Build this digital note taking system in Notion | Step-by-step Notion Tutorial

hi everyone want your own personalized digital note-taking app to organize all your thoughts in one place it's time to build your own in notion with me right now you can use it tomorrow if you like hi friends this is better creating i'm simon welcome or welcome back to the channel where i'm trying to simplify creative life so loads of stuff on this channel if you've not been here before around productivity simple living and creative tools to make our lives a little bit more stress-free and productive today i'm going to take you through step-by-step how to build this customized personalized notebook application essentially that can help you get more productive with where you collect your thoughts ideas study notes whatever it is you'll never lose a note again if you've not seen my previous video on this i do a little bit of a tour of the system we're building it in notion it's part of my wider productivity system that i've been building on various videos on this channel so if you've not seen those videos around my task and project management system you might like to check those out first of all and then come straight back to this video today we're going to crack on and build it step by step as quickly as possible by the end of this video you're going to have a database to search for all of your notes all the columns and functions and filters to make this system work we're going to create a new note template and a new notebook template and they allow us to quickly and easily add a new note with a kind of programmed template but also add a new notebook we're going to build the dashboard that will have the status views the notebooks and of course an inbox to capture things and we're going to build a quick notes inbox one that can sit at the top of whatever page you want it's easily clearable but it still allows you to have a normal inbox that keeps all your notes in it until you're filtering them into the relevant notebooks that you want them to go into now some of you might be thinking what about a template now templates are one thing and i will eventually be probably sharing one of this wider system but if i can show you how to build it you can then transform it into your very own system that's what i love about this kind of all-in-one workspace things like notion is that you can build your own so i want to give you the fishing rod instead of the fish right let's do it [Music] so here you'll see the personal home screen which is kind of a mirror of mine that i've built in previous videos so you might want to check those out um before and come back here if you want to kind of put this all together under my system heading here you can put this wherever you want you can just keep it in the sidebar of notion but i'm doing it here i'm going to put in a new database so i'm going to do forward slash i'm going to do a table um but i want my table to be a full page there is so let's click that in great we're going to call this notes i'm going to add an icon because i can so just click up here and add an icon um let's put that in very good and let's give it a cover so i think these things help again what's great about this is you can use unsplash in notion so i'm going to go in here i'm going to search for cheesy but i like it now name is good that's just the name of the note the next thing we want to add is in here i'm actually going to change this to this tags thing i'm going to make this a single select and we're going to call this status now in here i'm going to add the statuses i want for my notes live great i'm going to want priority so those then i can do a filter by priority and i want to do archived let's just delete all of those so you can just go to the little dots here and give them relevant colors as you'd like to see them there you go traffic light system kind of thing the next thing i want to put in is um a created date so we're going to add a column we're going to go here and actually we're going to um down the bottom you should say see created time in advanced i'm just going to insert that and it does it naturally fantastic and i want to rename that to say create it that then gives us a reference point to then be able to search how long they've been around for basically so some of this stuff is just the programming in the main system that then we can hide later in the dashboard i'm going to want to add them to notebooks because you could have notebooks as literally different databases but i don't want to do that because i want to be able to search everything in one place and i'm going to create my notebooks in a slightly different way so we're going to add a new column and we're going to make this a select we're going to call this we're going to call this add to notebook okay and in here you can exactly as you did with status invent notebooks that you want to have so let's just do a couple as an example here i'm going to do meeting notes creative ideas give me whatever you like yeah um this this might be a journal specific notebooks for specific types of work whatever you need it to be but there's some examples i'm going to now actually again just delete these you can probably do this a little bit more easily next i want to add a last edited the reason i want this is it's really really helpful for us to search for notes in the ones you've most recently looked at so again we're going to go to here go down to advanced and there's an automatic one in there last edited time i want to be able to know how long things have been around now this is for kind of future things but we're going to put it in and show you a little bit of formula work so we're going to add in here a today column so we're going to make this one a formula and in here we're going to put today and the root you're going to click on it and it'll allow you essentially when you do this to write in a formula and this is really really simple to put in today as a formula you write now open brackets close brackets and you'll see that it gives us the exact time now what that allows us to see is a difference between when something was created and right now and the time since you last edited it now that's useful to do this next function and i'm going to do a weeks old okay so we're going to click in here same thing again make it a formula we're going to name this weeks old so we're going to click on it see at the bottom of this date between and you'll see it gives us instructions so it says date between a date a date and a piece of text so the piece of text might be weeks years quarters whatever so you can actually um work this out in terms of time frames so i'm going to do date between then i'm going to click in go back up to the top i'm going to put in today and put a comma and then created yeah and then a comma and then i'm going to put in weeks and close the brackets there you go we've created a formula and now this will reveal in a single number how many weeks old it is it's really helpful because if you just want to filter by everything that you did in this last week or everything that's just three weeks old it gives you kind of ways to look at things and i think that's a really cool little little thing finally i want a couple more uh useful elements in here which are i'm going to add a space to put links so that's really easy you're just going to click here and add a url i'd like some attachments let's add those go in here file on media easy and i can label it finally we're just gonna put a check box in there for our quick notes section which we're gonna do later on and we're gonna just make this a check box and call this one hold on home screen it means that we'll be able to filter by it so that um stuff is held automatically in the quick notes when we tick out of it it will remove it i'll show you that later on and finally in here we want to be able to link it to our project database if you've made that so i'm going to do that really quickly but we're not actually going to put it in here because if you do that it all gets a bit messy so i'm going to go back out to my personal home i'm going to go and click on the project list that we built in the previous video here it is i'm going to add a new uh column here and this is going to be a relation okay clicking a relation we're going to select a database and it's very simple i just need to search for notes that's it there click on that create relation we need to label it and what you'll see now is if i then go back to my notes home you'll see related to project list is in here and then that will allow us now to there you go populate it with a related project really simple so you make that in the project list if you have one to link it back into here great that is our main database created now what we're just going to do is populate it with a couple of notes to give us some examples to work with make that a new notebook fantastic so we've got some examples to work with one that isn't added to a notebook and the rest that are let's now build the dashboard [Music] so on my home page or wherever you want to place this you can see that's my notes database that just sits there under system for me because i want to be able to control the way i see the information so it gets interesting first of all we're going to put a new page in i would suggest always make it this kind of page full width so you can go up to the dots in the top right full width just makes it nice and clean let's name it up to be notebooks or my notebooks it can be whatever you like let's call it that great and then make it look fancy go now i'm just going to make it empty with an icon i love that about notion it's nice and clean and simple from here then now you're going to get very familiar in this section with the phrase create link database because it's going to be essentially a set of views of that original database we made so we've done the hard work first of all we're going to want let's say an inbox so i'm going to do forward slash h2 to create a heading um the top one is i think h1 we're going to call it inbox if we like we can give that a color so you can go down to color and background color then you could put in an emoji forward slash go down to emoji and let's give that an inbox sign there you go just helps now forward slash create one of my favorite things on this channel um subscribe uh so we're going to click create link database find our notes database by searching for it there it is put it in there you'll see an exact copy of what we've just made now of course i don't want it to be that now anything we edit here you'll see with the little um diagonal arrow that means that if we edit this it won't affect the main existing the original database so we can kind of go to town here so we don't want to see all of this so i'm going to go to um properties under the little dots and we're just going to hide what we don't need so i'm going to hide the attachment so i'm going to hide when it was created i'm going to hide hold on home screen i'm going to hide last edited i'm going to hide links hide that we don't need to see today we don't need to see weeks old you know what i'm going to keep last edition i quite like having that is and you can move these around is we've got a view which just shows us the name of it um if it has a related project or a meeting with erica say um that one we might want to link that to a film shoot with erica there it is for my project list so it's linked to that um there we go brilliant now the other thing we want to do here is we want to make it so that only stuff we see um is stuff that isn't linked to a notebook so we need to filter it now if i now filter add to notebook add a filter and i want to put when add to notebook is empty and that means that only things that haven't been added to a notebook will stay in the inbox now the reason that's really helpful you see they've disappeared is that if i add this this creative idea to creative ideas it clears the inbox and that is the function that makes it work let's just undo that i just control z so there's our inbox now we want to build a notebook so we're going to go underneath and we're going to create another heading h2 we're going to call this um notebooks now what i'm going to use i'm going to use this element i'm going to grab it from the side i'm going to move it and place it next to this one and what you'll see is again if i then click take this and move it up underneath the inbox you'll see it drops so it just stays under there and this allows us to create columns i can move it across and it just cleans up the look of what we've created rather than just create a load of notebooks i want to create a template that allows me to create notebooks when i want to we're going to do forward slash template there's four just template button i'm gonna click that now oh it gets a little bit exciting so here we go configure your template button call this button and new notebook i want to delete this element here and then and that's where we're going to drop our blocks okay so that's ready to go now i can then build something and drop it into here and then we'll never have to build it again very cool so in fact the first thing i'm going to do is put create a little toggle list forward slash tog toggle okay uh in this toggle i'm going to drop it down um i'm going to call that a new notebook and then in here i'm going to put a create i'm going to create link database so we're doing exactly what we've just done now now that's in there and you'll see again it all comes up now what we need to do is filter this to look like a notebook i want it to be a list view let's do it i think it's cleanest so we're going to create a new list view um and we're going to call this one i'm going to go into here and i'm going to call this one like we did in the previous thing um last edited and i'm going to delete the table view there you go starting to look a bit different now i'm going to add another view another list and i'm going to make that one i'm going to call it view all notes there you go so we've got view by last edited and viewable notes really clear now these we want to filter so we now want to sort this by last edited so we're going to go in and click sort add a sort i'm going to do when last edited is descending and i also want to filter this i'm going to filter this add a filter and the first filter we're going to add is where status is not archived now that means that anything that's archived won't turn up in the last edited view and everything else will great so that's done now the next thing you'd think you'd want to do is filter it by the notebook the add to notebook is let's say meeting note and you make it meeting notes so what you'll see is if i do that we only have that meeting now however this is a template and that's not helpful for us so what we're actually going to do is change that that so that add to notebook is empty but it means that we can then edit this to add the notebook name and it will work so there you go that is our first element we're going to go into view all notes add a saw and we're going to add where created is descending the other thing we want to do with these views is is work out what properties we want to see now i think it's great to see weeks old in this in all notes we don't want to see less edited we want to see created because that's what we're sorting it by to see the related project and its status so you can just make this look how you like by moving these around can mess around with that and you might want to do exactly the same in the other view you want to see last edited rather than created there you go now that looks quite clean so it's kind of made and we're going to make the basic one a gray background there you go so there is my new notebook i'm now going to take this and i'm going to drop it into this block here the other thing you might want to do is put in a title like this a description like this that explains what to do replace add to notebook filter with the notebook choice on both views color code and change the size as needed i forgot to do one thing uh i forgot to put in all notes i need to also add a filter here which is say set up and ready to go so add filter where add to notebook is empty yeah so that's just ready to go so if we now add a notebook let's see what this looks like add notebook hey and it turns up and i can just build the notebooks so obviously over here i want to i want to match these so i'm going to do that i'm going to make an r i'm going to make this first one orange so let's just do it let's follow the instructions and see if this works here we go add to notebook is meeting notes i want to do that in the other view as well great look at that there's my face notebook so there they all are i've made my um notebooks i tend to think it's great to also change the emoji let you just do it delete the one in the template forward slash just so it gives it a clear image uh project planning rockets fantastic so that's my notebooks area so over here now we're going to quickly create the status views now these can be whatever you like and it works exactly the same way as the inbox you're just going to filter by status so an obvious thing is first of all i want my priority notes find your database see how simple it is now to create views now with these um status views once i've created one i'm actually going to be able to duplicate them so i'm again i'm not going to have to do loads and loads of work i could take this one and i could duplicate it yes it's a copy of my project planning but it's got all the other programming in it hasn't it rather good so you could actually just build it create it from your notebooks and drop it over here let's edit that let's delete this one so with priority view i'm going to delete um view or note because i don't need two views to it that's now actually filtered by currently when status is not archived do you want to change it to status is priority um and this one we want to delete right the next thing i want to do is do everything that is live so i can view all my notes that are currently in action so we're going to do h2 again and we're going to call this one all live notes who to guest same process emoji priority notes done simple as that next i'm going to do is duplicate it so copy of the priority view move it down saves you a lot of work and we can simply here go to filter when status is live we've also naturally got um last edited descending because we copied from this over here now when we create notes i think it would be useful to be able to have a um a template so over here we're going to go to new i'm going to do new template and simply we're just going to put this as call this a new note we're going to make the status live because we always want it to be live and actually that's all we need now this button will become useful in a moment now in here you can put whatever you want so you can just be make it all look lovely you can add an icon if you want great the other thing i might want to add is a quick note i'm going to take the new note i'm going to duplicate it but what i'm going to add is a hold on home screen is going to be ticked and there's a good reason for that i'm going to call this one quick note so you now have a new note and a quick note finally we're going to duplicate our inbox and we're going to put this onto our home screen now to make a quick note in box i want to change it so that first of all the view is a list i'm going to delete the table view a filter again add a notebook is empty but i'm also going to add a filter and that hold on home screen is ticked now what that means is that if i wanted to do a quick note and click a quick note i want to just get my properties so i can see that uh hold on home screen tip i can just click that and it will disappear but you'll notice it stays in the current inbox that's really helpful because it means i've just got a quick place to drop stuff so i'm going to take this copy and i'm going to move it to my personal home there you go now if we go back to personal home you will see it down the bottom here now you can put this way you like it i find for notes what's great is i can actually put it right up here and what i'm actually going to do here is go there you go now what that means is i can very simply add a new note um make it a quick note uh it turns up there so i can continue working on it if i want to and when i'm finished with it i can go great that's done i won't worry about it for now then when i want to sort out my notes i can go back to my notebook home page it's in there and i can add it to a notebook and that is really really helpful because it allows me to control things uh in a much more clean way when i'm wanting to just input something on my mobile whatever it is what's brilliant now is you can also write written notes intonation i talk a little bit more about how that works in the previous video on this notebook system i'm also in there breaking down how you can actually draw draw images and keep that lovely free function that you love from a notebook and bring it into this system if you're not subscribed hit the subscribe button it means more of my videos will pop up in your feed like these you might find them useful more on productivity and creativity and a kind of productive creative lifestyle let me know what you'd like to see more of on the channel and i will do my best to fulfill those requests thanks for joining me until next time get off your computer go outside get some air and i'll see you in the next video bye-bye

Channel: Better Creating

Views: 53,721

Keywords: Notion, digital note-taking, digital note taking, notion tutorial, note taking system, notion tutorial for beginners, note-taking apps, Notes app, best note-taking app, Notion setup, digital notebook, meeting notes in notion, notion tour, best notes app, second brain, roam vs notion, notion vs evernote, digital notebook template, notion dashboard, bettercreating, Better creating, note taking apps, notes in notion, notion note taking tutorial, notion productivity system

Id: rdsdANRCo1w

Length: 23min 33sec (1413 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 26 2020